Memory Lane

Mom shared many of her own memories and stories with me. Here are a few:

Dancing: Mom met Dad while he was on military leave in St. Louis through mutual friends at a hugely popular dance hall called Tune Town. She thought he was quite handsome in his paratrooper pants and boots that laced up to his knees. What is it about a man in a uniform? When stationed at Fort Bragg, he had learned how to do the North Carolina Shag, known as the swing dance of the South. The Shag step is a blues shuffle: one-and-two; three-and-four; five, six. It's fast and fun and because Mom loved to dance as much as Dad did, he taught her how to Shag. The girl had no problem keeping up with him; Mary Pointer could dance! From there, they danced their way into a relationship to the swing music of bands such as Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Buddy RIch, and Woody Herman.

But there was more to Dad than his fancy footwork that dazzled my mother. He told her that after the war, he planned to earn his degree in engineering on the G.I. Bill at Washington University in St. Louis. This impressed her but she also like his "style." Dad, like any nineteen-year-old, wanted to have a good time, but he also possessed a serious demeanor and his deep-set blue eyes conveyed intelligence. Oh, how that brown-eyed girl loved his blue eyes! My father was a dignified and sophisticated young man with a quiet, dry sense of humor and Mom claimed that even at nineteen, when he walked into a room, he "looked like somebody important." My mother enjoyed being the girl on his arm when they entered a restaurant or party and she loved being the girl in his arms on the dance floor. So, she decided he would be a good catch, a much better match than the handsome Italian boxer she had previously dated. Who needs a husband who made a living by getting the crap beat out of him? she asked. Good point. She also warned me: Never hook up with the guy that has the biggest mouth at the party. The one who is telling all the jokes and loudly making everybody laugh. He's a show-off and he will always need too much attention. The quiet guy standing aside and assessing the room is a man who thinks and pays attention. That's the kind of guy your Dad is and that's the kind of man who will make a good husband. (Remember, in the 50s and 60s, finding a good husband was a girl's ticket to security. Developing a career and independence was not thought to be a good path for a girl.)

When I was in middle school, Dad taught me how to dance the jitterbug and Shag, but even during the 60s after dancing styles dramatically changed, whenever a dance floor was provided during weddings or other events, I always considered getting the opportunity to dance with my father a privilege. He was graceful, light on his feet, and fast. The last time we danced together, we were at my step-sister's wedding reception. The DJ put on an oldie, a swing tune. My stepmother danced only to slow songs so Dad, itching to cut a rug, held his hand out to me and we strutted onto the dance floor. We strutted because we both knew that we were probably the only two people among all the guests that really knew how to dance to that particular kind of music. And, we were. Regardless, I was soon out of breath and exhausted. Well into his late fifties, Dad was still going strong without any sign of fatigue. He laughed at me because I couldn't keep up with him. I huffed and puffed and finally gave him a big hug and abdicated. He hugged me back but puffed up in delight, still the king of the dance floor. The man was amazing.

Mom had also been phenomenal on the dance floor. She was the second youngest in a family of nine and her older brothers and sisters grew up in an era when dancing was a major form of entertainment, so she had many teachers. Growing up in the inner city of St. Louis, she lived just a few blocks from several black families whose children embedded bottle caps in the bottoms of their shoes and tap danced on the sidewalk. She was enthralled by their skill and having seen this very same form of dancing in the movies, entreated the black children to teach her. Those kids must have been great teachers because even in her adulthood, mom could hoof.

I witnessed my parents on the dance floor many times throughout my childhood, and I'm not sure either one of them knew how marvellous they looked together, their bodies in sync, their spirits abandoned to the rhythm of the music, and their eyes shining in complete joy. Because of the sheer bliss and beauty that erupts between two people dancing together, perhaps we should not allow the custom to ever disappear from our culture. Perhaps, too, if we danced more, we would feel less lonely, less despair, and less anxiety. C'mon kids, let's dance!

The Pub

Other than daydreaming about becoming a famous stage star, Mom had some rather unusual fantasies. One particularly worried me because I had a strong suspicion that she was serious about following through with it. Every so often she declared she had an urge to go grocery shopping in a housecoat and Dad's old work boots and whilst pushing the grocery cart down the aisle break out in a Broadway song and dance. When I asked her what she wanted to sing, she responded: Everything's Coming Up Roses. Just like Ethel Merman. Perhaps this was a response to her frustrated ambitions but every time she shared this fantasy with me, I feared she had a screw loose. In retrospect, Mom may simply have been ahead of her time; she possessed the zany humor of Monty Python or SNL.

Case in point: When we lived in Dallas, she once treated my sister and me to lunch at a pub-type restaurant. While waiting for a table, the three of us became deeply engrossed in a conversation (probably some juicy gossip about other family members we always loved to share) when it became apparent that a woman who sat next to us and who was also waiting for a table was eavesdropping. Without a moment of hesitation in her dialogue, Mom looked the woman square in the eye and with an acquired British accent said, "I simply adore dining at the pub, the pub, the pub. Don't you?" Clearly thinking my mother insane, the poor woman's face froze. Worse, as she jumped up to find someplace else to wait for her table, she stumbled and nearly fell, whereupon my mother grabbed her arm to keep her upright. I'm not sure what was going through the lady's mind at that point, but alarmed, her stumble turned into a run and she disappeared through the restaurant's door. I turned toward my mother with tightly pressed lips and shook my head to demonstrate my reproach, but did I find Mom embarrassed or concerned about what had happened? No. Instead, she was hunched over with her face screwed up in laughter, wiping away tears of mirth that rolled down her cheeks. I raised my eyebrows as if to ask, "Well, what do you have to say for yourself?" "Oh," she choked out her words through her laughter, "don't give me that look. I kept that poor woman from falling on her face and just think of the story she now has to share at her next Bridge game." At that point, I wondered who my mother really was. What happened to her dreams of becoming Ginger Rogers? Instead, she was more Lucille Ball.

The Nightmare

On the flip side, Mom shared a nightmare Dad had, one that so terrified him that he woke up in a cold sweat. The dream haunted him. In it, he stood at the edge of an ash pit where he witnessed people and great cities burning. But as dreams go, the ash pit represented the whole world. He quietly carried the pain and fear he experienced during the Depression and war years to the extent that I was grown with my own children before discovering he had been awarded a Bronze Star in WWII. He never spoke about what he saw or did while in Europe other than a single little tale about meeting some French prostitutes under a bridge while on leave with some of his buddies. Dad was not one to share his feelings and he kept much of his life close to the vest. Much of what I did learn about my father came from my mother or his older sister, my Aunt Thelma. I wonder if his trust in people and his perception of humanity had been altered by what he had experienced. Dad had a great love for life, and while the dream seems counterintuitive to that, it is not. Standing at the edge of an ash pit and watching the world he loved burn epitomizes his sorrow for mankind's inability to protect what is sacred. Dad possessed a deep spiritual belief in the sanctity of life but his tight-lipped manner and his reluctance to share his feelings was the product of fear, the fear that the ash pit dream reveals. Something he said to me soon after my mother died truly illustrates the duality between my father's capacity for love and his fear of losing it . "I have such bitterness. Now that your mother is gone, that is all I have left." While my mother's pain exploded through her fantasies and humor, my father's pain buried itself deep in his psyche until he found it difficult to express the very thing he treasured most: love.